More rarely do we look at understated depictions of the future in history, simply because they tend to appear quite ordinary to modern eyes. This illustration by Harry Grant Dart — a man who was no stranger to the cartoonish and the fantastical — shows the U.S. airmail service in the not-too-distant future. The image appeared on the May 31, 1919 cover of Literary Digest and shows mail bags attached to parachutes, which are then dropped by airplane; all eyes of a small town fixated on this postal payload from the heavens.

As one might expect, it took a long time to modernize airmail service, but Dart's image — however quaint it appears today — depicts one revolutionary step forward in making our world feel that much smaller.